This year marks 20 years since The Verve's seminal album Urban Hymns and tomorrow an anniversary edition of the album comes out.
It was their third album and has sold over 10 million copies worldwide and is one of the 20 biggest selling albums ever in the UK.
The CD and vinyl box set comes with a remastered version of the album, all of the accompanying b-sides, previously unreleased live material including their 1998 Haigh Hall, Wigan hometown show in full and the DVD includes The Video 96-98 documentary plus plenty of unseen footage of their 94 tour in the US.
Here Georgie Rogers sits down with guitarist Nick McCabe and bassist Simon Jones to discuss the making of Urban Hymns, the whirlwind after it came out, their memories of 1997, and whether they’ve been in touch with Richard Ashcroft during this nostalgic time marking two decades of Urban Hymns.
Urban Hymns, The Verve's legendary breakthrough album, turns 20 next month. Released on 29 September 1997, Urban Hymns was the band's third long player, and was recorded amidst band tensions between October 1996 and May 1997 that had already resulted in them breaking up after 1995's second album A Northern Soul.
Having initially reformed without guitarist Nick McCabe in the early part of 1996 before welcoming him back into the fold in January 1997, it went onto become their most revered body of work. Spawning three top ten singles including a number one in 'The Drugs Don't Work', Urban Hymns has sold over ten million copies worldwide and is regarded as a landmark of the Britpop era.
In a rare interview with DiS, McCabe talks us through the making of the record and subsequent split, their short lived second reunion in 2007, and the numerous projects he's working on at this moment in time.
DiS: Urban Hymns is 20 years old in September. It doesn't seem that long ago to me. Is that the same for you?
Nick McCabe: It doesn't really, no. I think that's a function of getting older though, really! It's unfortunate isn't it? I'm still about 16 in my mind. It's a funny one because people ask me all the time whether I listen to it much and I don't really. It's part of the ongoing process of making music. I don't make any distinction between being 14 and playing with an echo tape and synthesizer. It's all part of the same story. I've got used to those time spans being talked about but the shock's gone out of it so it really doesn't feel like 20 years ago. 20 years is a long time but that's not how it seems to me. I remember making most of Urban Hymns as well. I read a Robin Guthrie article where he talked about when he stopped all his monkey business and couldn't remember anything afterwards. Yet while he was in the midst of it he could remember every minute. For me, there's certain bits that are etched on my mind whereas other bits are quite foggy.
When the songs for Urban Hymns first started coming together, you weren't part of the band. How did you become involved and what influence did you have on the way the album was shaped?
That's right. The songs that became Urban Hymns started towards the end of A Northern Soul. The jams and that kind of stuff. 'Come On' was really old even then. That dates back about a year before A Northern Soul. 'The Rolling People' as well. They'd both been in gestation for a long time. 'The Drugs Don't Work' was written during A Northern Soul. It went through a couple of lyrical changes. I'm pretty sure it went "The drugs don't work they make ME worse at the time". I think Richard (Ashcroft) was finding his feet as a songwriterin a way he'd never entertained being before. Probably watching the Oasis phenomenon sky rocket he thought I fancy a bit of that. We were in a different world to that at the time. It was probably quite a difficult move for him to pick a guitar up in the first place; it was all new to him. So by the time I'd been sacked and then reinstated, they'd recorded most of those songs several times with different producers. Some of them were great, and there's a couple of things that got ditched which were amazing. For example, there's a version of 'Song For The Lovers' that's really nice and delicate. It was almost a disappointment to me what Richard did to it for his solo record. The version they did before I rejoined was almost like The Las or a Byrds tune, really refined and delicate.
The songs that ended up on Urban Hymns were really quite static when I first heard them. Had they been as amazing as they were when I finished with them I might not have been asked back! But it was one of those things where I knew what I had to do as soon as I heard the demos. Musically, I was in a confident state where I knew what I could bring to the party with them. They were quite obviously unfinished. The Lindsey Buckingham aesthetic was a bit of a touchstone for me in that when someone presents you with a bunch of songs it becomes your job to interpret them in some way. I first heard them at Simon's (Jones) house. When I came back to the band I was sofa surfing and I stopped round at Si's. I was out quite a lot of the time but then we'd come back late at night and listen to what they had. I remember him playing me everything one night. I'd heard rumblings from friends of mine in Wigan who'd somehow got hold of in progress tapes and I think they kept quiet because they didn't want to hurt my feelings. There was a bit of me that didn't want it to be too good because nobody likes to be dispensable. So I was quite satisfied when I could hear exactly what I needed to do to bring the songs to life.
When Oasis’ feverishly-anticipated third album, Be Here Now, was released in August 1997, it rocketed to the top of the UK charts, becoming the fastest-selling album in British chart history. Yet the celebrations were brief and strangely muted, for it was the record that knocked Be Here Now off the top of the UK Top 40 – The Verve’s Urban Hymns, recently reissued as a 5CD+DVD super deluxe box set – that captured the zeitgeist as Britpop went into terminal decline.
Fronted by the intensely charismatic Richard Ashcroft and precociously talented sonic foil, lead guitarist Nick McCabe, the idealistic Lancashire quartet had promised something of this magnitude from the moment they signed to Virgin Records offshoot Hut in 1991. Produced by John Leckie (Radiohead, The Stone Roses), The Verve’s 1993 debut, A Storm In Heaven, was an ethereal, psychedelia-streaked beauty of considerable promise, while it’s acclaimed successor, 1995’s A Northern Soul, veered closer to the mainstream, eventually peaking inside the UK Top 20.
Though contrasting with the hedonism inherent in Britpop, the introspective A Northern Soul had still generated two British Top 30 hits, ‘On Your Own’ and the keening, string-kissed ballad ‘History’, both of which suggested that Richard Ashcroft was rapidly emerging as a songwriter of major significance.
Going gold, A Northern Soul left The Verve seemingly all set for crossover success, yet with the band burnt out by the usual rock’n’roll symptoms of excess and exhaustion, Ashcroft rashly split the group just before ‘History’ began climbing the charts. As events proved, however, the band’s split was only temporary. Within weeks, The Verve were back in business, albeit minus guitarist Nick McCabe, but with the addition of new guitarist/keyboardist Simon Tong, an old school friend who’d originally taught Ashcroft and bassist Simon Jones to play guitar.
The band already had working versions of emotive new songs, including ‘Sonnet’ and ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’, with Ashcroft having written the latter on Jones’ beaten-up black acoustic guitar early in 1995. Instead of the exploratory jams that produced The Verve’s earlier material, these vividly and finely-honed songs were the logical extension of A Northern Soul’s plaintive ballads ‘History’ and ‘On Your Own’, and they reflected the direction The Verve tenaciously pursued as they started work on what would become Urban Hymns.
“Those two tunes [‘Sonnet’ and ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’] were written in a much more definitive way… more of a singer-songwriter approach,” Ashcroft says today. “For me, I wanted to write concise stuff at that point. That opened up a well of material and melodies.”
Urban Hymns came together slowly, with The Verve cutting demos at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios in Bath, and then with A Northern Soul producer Owen Morris, before the album sessions proper commenced with producers Youth (The Charlatans, Crowded House) and Chris Potter at London’s famous Olympic Studios in Barnes. At Richard Ashcroft’s instigation, string arranger Wil Malone (Massive Attack, Depeche Mode) was brought in and his swirling scores added a further dimension to a number of the album’s key tracks, including ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ and ‘Lucky Man’.
During these protracted sessions, The Verve expanded to a quintet after the estranged Nick McCabe was welcomed back into the fold. Among his arsenal of guitars, McCabe brought a Coral electric sitar and a Rickenbacker 12-string to the studio, and his spontaneity was encouraged as he added his inimitable magic to the guitars already precisely layered by Simon Tong. “What [Nick] did was very respectful,” Jones says today. “He made it all intertwine. He embellished what was already there and how it turned out was a beautiful thing.”
Assisted further by what Richard Ashcroft enthusiastically refers to as the “loose discipline” of Youth’s production methods, The Verve emerged triumphantly from the painstaking Olympic sessions knowing they had created music that would have a lasting impact.
“I knew the history of that room [Olympic Studio] and we were now a part of it,” Ashcroft recalls, speaking of the studio that had previously hosted the likes of The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. “We’d hit a timeless seam. When Wil got those scores down, it was this incredible feeling that we could just hit Rewind and hear them again and again. It was like walking into a bank with millions and millions of pounds’ worth of music.”
The band’s self-belief was vindicated when Urban Hymns’ first single, ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, shot to No.2 in the UK in June 1997. Built around Malone’s strings and a four-bar sample from Andrew Loog Oldham’s orchestral rendition of The Rolling Stones’ ‘The Last Time’, the song was stamped with a timeless quality and soon gained further traction thanks to a memorable, MTV-friendly promotional film of Ashcroft walking down a busy London pavement, seemingly oblivious of anything going on around him.
With their star firmly in the ascendant, The Verve scheduled their first UK gigs for two years in September ’97, just as the album’s second single, the glorious orchestral swell of ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’, furnished them with their first UK No.1. Urban Hymns’ majestic trailer singles were inevitably singled out for praise when the album emerged, yet the record seamlessly ebbed and flowed between the band’s customary psychedelic wig-outs (‘The Rolling People’, ‘Catching The Butterfly’, the valedictory ‘Come On’) and expansive, existential laments such as ‘Space And Time’, ‘Weeping Willow’ and the elegant ‘Sonnet’. Barely a second seemed superfluous.
With Urban Hymns, The Verve delivered the transcendent masterpiece they’d promised all along. With the critics onside (Melody Maker hailing the record as “an album of unparalleled beauty”) and fans unanimous in their praise, Urban Hymns not only knocked Be Here Now off the top of the UK chart (where it remained for 12 weeks), but also soared to No.12 in the US and went on to sell over 10 million copies worldwide.
Concerted acclaim followed, with The Verve scooping two Brit Awards in 1998, a coveted Rolling Stone cover and a Grammy Award nomination (in the Best Rock Song category) for ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’. Yet the magic the band alchemised was volatile at the best of times, and after The Verve split for a second time, in 1999, nine years elapsed before they returned to the fray and belatedly followed their masterpiece with Forth in 2008.
Released during a remarkable year for alt.rock, during which era-defining titles such as Radiohead’s OK Computer and Spiritualized’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space were also issued, The Verve’s Urban Hymns remains one of the most seminal albums of the 90s.
“I had 100 per cent confidence it was going to be massive,” drummer Pete Salisbury recalls of this intense time. “Urban Hymns was a complete mix of where we were as a band. We were peaking.”
Proof, if it were needed: included in the album’s newly-expanded six-disc edition is the band’s legendary homecoming show at Wigan’s Haigh Hall. A juggernaut performance in front of over 30,000 fans on 24 May 1998, it confirms what many have known for years: that The Verve circa Urban Hymns were a force of nature.
Richard Ashcroft has spoken out about Liam Gallagher‘s ‘secret cameo’ on The Verve‘s classic album, ‘Urban Hymns’.
It has long been known that the former Oasis frontman leant backing vocals on the track ‘Come On’, but there has also been a mystery surrounding what exactly it is that he sings. Now, Ashcroft has opened up about the album’s various jokes and mysteries.
“I mean there’s lots of jokes within the album,” Ashcroft told BBC 6 Music. “Liam Gallagher is on the last track ‘Come On’. I don’t think anyone knows this, but if you concentrate you can hear some demented guy screaming ‘come on’. I imagine everyone thinks that’s me, but I remember him doing it.
“He arrived at the studio with the tape of a song he’d just done with [Stone Roses’ guitarist] John Squire. He proceeded, as he does, to play it 15 times in a row in the studio. I played him ‘Bittersweet [Symphony]’, then I said ‘we’re doing ‘Come On’ now, you gotta be on it. He went into this booth with someone else, and he was going ballistic at the end of it – smashing the tambourine against the side of the vocal booth, screaming.”
